1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to technologies for translating a bitmapped document.
2. Description of the Related Art
Various technologies have been proposed up to the present in order to scan a document provided on a paper medium and optimally handle the document as document data. For example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication H05-274397 discloses technology that performs character discrimination in a scanned document, and after appropriately modifying the contents of that data, exchanges it between remote devices. Also, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication 2002-108855 discloses technology that recognizes characters with high accuracy, even from a portion of a document that includes maps, illustrations, or the like.
In the past, attempts have been made to replace only the character portion of a document with new characters translated into another language, while maintaining the appearance of colors, patterns, and the like that form the background of the document, by altering the document data, obtained by scanning the document, at the pixel level. Ordinarily, document data is provided as a bitmap wherein the contents of the scanned document are displayed by pairs of pixel location and pixel value. Accordingly, when a new character obtained by translating a character inscribed in that region is overwritten as-is in the region within the bitmap, as shown in FIG. 4 (A), because the overwriting character lies on top of the originally inscribed character, its legibility is significantly compromised. On the other hand, it is certainly possible to avoid a piling of characters if the new characters are written after the pixel value of the pixels constituting the originally present character is set once to white. However, even when adopting this sort of method, when the background of the document is drawn in a color or pattern other than white, as shown in FIG. 4 (B), a white outline of the character remains in the background of the document, compromising legibility in the same manner as before.
The present invention has been made in view of the above circumstances, and provides an arrangement with which it is possible to replace only the character portion of a document with new characters translated into another language, while maintaining the appearance of colors, patterns, and the like that form the background of the document.